Renaissance Poetry

One early poet whom it is difficult to categorize is John Skelton (14607-1529), who was tutor to Prince Henry, later to become Henry VIII. He is a transitional figure, displaying characteristics of both the Medieval and Renaissance periods, and a strange mixture of ornate language (in such poems as the dream-allegory Garland of Laurel) and the vigorous colloquialisms of works written in the near-doggerel mode known as Skeltonics (short lines arranged in rhyming groups of up to 10 lines with the same rhyme) and seen in such works as The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming, the story of how a certain ale-wife brewed her beer and the horrible ingredients that went into it.

The influence of Italian poetry on English writers in the Renaissance was very strong. Two of the most important poets from the mid-sixteenth century - Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) - spent much time and energy trying to render the fourteen-line Italian sonnet into English, and, in fact, much of their work is translated or adapted from Petrarch. Surrey also translated Virgil's Aeneid into English blank verse, little knowing that he had invented a form which was to dominate much of the finest literature to come (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, to name three).

The sonnet form was also to ha» a particularly strong influence! the next generation of pofl Wyatt and Surrey wrote sonrfl based on the rather convention situation of an anxious and dull lover addressing his rather proB and unreceptive mistress in series of stock images. The poets who followed gavethi own personal twist to the fora Sidney in his sequence Astrqtt and Stella makes fun of somei the rather artificial conventions although other sonnets seem! delight in them. Shakespeare, vi masterful wordplay and magica images, transformed the sonnj into a highly expressive means d conveying not just adoration о affection but also disillusions passion. Apart from debate ovs who exactly his sonnets are addressed to (some are definitely written to a man, others to a mysterious 'dark lady') one thing is certain: his depth of moral vision is simply lacking in the other sonneteers of the time.

One of the finest Elizabethan poets was Edmund Spenser, an ambitious and gifted man who wanted to write poems in English which could be compared with the classical epics by Homer and Virgil or with the newer Italian verse of Ariosto and Tasso. He wished to improve the English language and, at the same time, return to its roots in the popular stories and myths of an older tradition. The result was The Fairie Queene, an extraordinary combination of the Medieval and the Renaissance, of popular and aristocratic features. Ben Jonson (1572-1637), apart from his work in the dramatic field, also produced major poetic works, and was to be a profound influence on the poetry of the later seventeenth century, with his polished wit and urbanity, illumined by his wide-ranging knowledge of the classics. In contrast to the so-called Metaphysical poets, his work is essentially public, containing none of the agonizing introspection of, say, John Donne, but a smooth elegance and a profound sense of the poet's role in society.